Nila credit

Nila is a Whatsapp digital wallet that offers vouched crop loans to (smallholder) farmers in India. Nila is an experiment in non-collateralized loan distribution through sponsorships, or coordinated trust, as imagined by Consensys in 2021.

Nila is piloted in Tamil Nadu, India. Unvetted farmers are able to receive a crop loan if vouched by a vetted partner that receives a part of the interest pay. A sponsor can be the village farm cooperative, trader, bank or any locally known entity.

Furthermore:

• loans are denominated in digital INR.
• the chatbot has a payment module for UPI transactions.
• sponsors receive a detailed farm scorecard upon a vouch request through WhatsApp.
• automates repay warnings using field monitoring.
• future upscale focuses on collateralised loans through crop tokenisation.